60 Years ago on May 29th Ruth and I were married in D. C. Superior Court. It would been our 60th Wedding Anniversary. Ruth was a little late because she had to finnish sewing her wedding dress. The reception was held at Walter and Ila’s apartment. We honeymooned over the weekend in our apartment in Queenstown.
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On Banks
Among other things, banks loan money for interest and either require security or charge exorbitant interest (usuary) if unsecured. I might add that the credit card companies also get a usurious rate on the other end, driving costs for the seller up. We are talking 25% to 50% annually here. Jessie James used a gun,
i financed my small businesses out of my hide, never borrowed a dime from a bank and did just fine.
mendacious, meretricious termagant (Fits exactly the Blond Bombshells of Fox News)
adjective
mendacious
lying, untruthful, dishonest, deceitful, false, dissembling, insincere, disingenuous, hypocritical, fraudulent, double-dealing, two-faced, two-timing, duplicitous, perjured; untrue, fictitious, falsified, fabricated, fallacious, invented, made up; informal full of crap; literary perfidious. antonym truthful.
adjective
meretricious
1) apparently attractive but having in reality no value or integrity :
the meretricious glitter of the whole charade worthless, valueless, cheap, tawdry, trashy, Brummagem, tasteless, kitsch, kitschy; false, artificial, fake, imitation; informal tacky, chintzy.
termagant |ˈtərməgənt|
noun
1) a harsh-tempered or overbearing woman.
2) ( Termagant) historical an imaginary deity of violent and turbulent character, often appearing in morality plays.
ORIGIN Middle English (sense 2) : via Old French from Italian Trivigante, taken to be from Latin tri- ‘three’ + vagant- ‘wandering,’ and to refer to the moon “wandering” between heaven, earth, and hell under the three names Selene, Artemis, and Persephone.
• ( tartar) a harsh, fierce, or intractable person : “Merciful God! but you’re a tartar, miss!” said the sheriff, ruefully.
belligerent, bellicose, boob (George W Bush)
troglodyte |ˈträgləˌdīt|
noun
(esp. in prehistoric times) a person who lived in a cave.
• a hermit.
• a person who is regarded as being deliberately ignorant or old-fashioned.
Someone who is brutish, reactionary, or primitive
Orotund Oaf (NJGov)
orotund
the orotund rhetoric of his prose pompous, pretentious, affected, fulsome, grandiose, ornate, overblown, flowery, florid, high-flown, magniloquent, grandiloquent, rhetorical, oratorical; informal highfalutin, purple.
Gregory Volfovich Chudnovsky - Pi
The First Liberal
How Montaigne made us modern.
Reviewed by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Liberalism, at its core, is not so much a doctrine as a disposition, a habit of mind, and it’s compounded of two principal elements: An abhorrence of cruelty and a sense of the provisional nature of human knowledge.
In an age of slobs and goys
Wanting wisdom void of shite
Who will nerve heroic boys
To hazard awl in a last food fight
On Swearing 2
How about “shitbitches” From Joyce’s motorman on Bloom’s stumble in front of the street car. Bloom was on his way to night town.
Debt Ceiling
The full faith and credit of the United States would be in jeopardy. Treasury bonds would go into free fall. Interest rates would skyrocket. We, and most of the rest of the world, would fall into financial chaos.
Dilettantism or the cultivation of an area of interest, such as the arts, without real commitment or knowledge.
Professional
To truly master an art or a skill is to learn their fundamentals step by step and then weave the object of your creation so that your audience/readers/customers and your critics recognize it as a professional work. Veblen called this procedure the Instinct of Workmanship and it is the only route to excellence.
On Taxes
We haven’t got rid of the debris yet, so we have to go where the money is. Tax the rich now and tax the working stiff when he goes back to work. Clean up the tax code and get mortgages floating again. Raise the debt ceiling without riders and get on with the public’s business.
Grandpa27’s formulas for success in a crooked world:
1) Why do a clean job when a shabby job does as well.
2) When money knocks at the door, ethics go out the window.
3) We don’t have time to do the job right, just time to do it over,
dishabille |ˌdisəˈbēl| (also deshabille)
noun
the state of being only partly or scantily clothed : the paintings of Venus all shared the same state of dishabille.
ORIGIN late 17th cent.: from French déshabillé, ‘undressed.’
Here is Adam Smith on Labor relations
“We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate…Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy till the moment of execution; and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people” In contrast, when workers combine, “the masters..never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combination of servants, labourers, and journeymen.”
“…[a]ll for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” (Book 3, Chapter 4)
When will the Democrats get the message, JOBS, JOBS ,JOBS …
Balance the budget be damned, TAX the ones that can pay. Those are NOT tax payers dollars, they are revenue dollars and no government can run without them for long.
Uncle Sam’s Congressional Lament;
Had plenty money back in 0 0 2.
You let somebody make a fool of you.
Why don’t you do right?
Get out of here
and get me some money too.
Depression
I was there, all-be -it as a child, but we were protected from scenes like old women picking over garbage at the dump, because we lived on the right side of the tracks (ICRR Tracks, Hyde Park, Chicago). We did see lots of poor hungry Bums (read unemployed working stiffs) at the back door that were begging for food. That’s the real price of sustained unemployment. Wake up you SOB denizens of the Capitol.
As I before stated, the President should refuse to sign any debt ceiling bill that comes before him with riders. The whole idea of debt ceiling may be unconstitutional and this aspect should be pushed by the Justice Department. The longer we dither the worse the JOB problem will be.
One fell swoop occurred in Santayana’s The Life of Reason. Vol ! (1907). It is spelled out in three words, but it is used as one word. Should it not be hyphenated? Fell - to take or cut down and swoop - seize with a sweeping motion. ORIGIN: from Shakespeare’s Macbeth ( iv. iii. 219)
This was said years ago: ”Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905. Match that with the liberal stance: ”Liberalism, at its core, is not so much a doctrine as a disposition, a habit of mind, and it’s compounded of two principal elements: An abhorrence of cruelty and a sense of the provisional nature of human knowledge.” and you have the solution to many arguments, if only both sides would accept the “provisional nature of human knowledge”. Unfortunately the reveled truths held by the extreme, leading and most vocal elements of the conservative movement preclude any dialog.
In the past, english used to distinguish gender with masculine and feminine endings. Aviator/aviatrix and others. Is there an editrix? The answer is yes and a good thing has been lost in the dumbing down of gender. Women are not honorary men.
Krugman & me
I and you keep harping on the differences betweem macro & micro economics. We are not just one big family. There are differences in the roles of family & government. Families raise children and grow old in a limited way; governments supply the stability through law & order and supply the grease to make life work.
Book of Ruth
Treatments paid for by Medicare and Care First put my wife on the fast track to death. In 110 days she went from a happy if slightly demented companion to a gasping victim who expired as a result of C-Dif. On the way through this journey she was treated as a cash cow. I saw it all - ER, Poor diagnosis, Ineffective PT, and other problems. I am not a happy widower.
/I hope that Paul Krugman and Robert Reich read each other’s blogs. Micro is different from macro. When you all met with the president did he not seem to know the difference. Those that know not that they know not TEACH THEM!!!
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám ?
MEAN
adjective
1 a mean trick unkind, nasty, unpleasant, spiteful, malicious, unfair, cruel, shabby, foul, despicable, contemptible, obnoxious, vile, odious, loathsome, base, low; informal horrible, horrid, hateful, rotten, lowdown; beastly. antonym kind.
2 he’s too mean to leave a tip miserly, niggardly, close-fisted, parsimonious, penny-pinching, cheeseparing, Scroogelike; informal tightfisted, stingy, tight, mingy, money-grubbing, cheap; formal penurious. antonym generous, munificent.
3 the truth was obvious to even the meanest intelligence inferior, poor, limited, restricted.
4 their mean origins lowly, humble, ordinary, low, low-born, modest, common, base, proletarian, plebeian, obscure, ignoble, undistinguished; archaic baseborn. antonym noble.
5 informal : he’s a mean cook. See excellent
On Obama
It is not President Obama’s policies that produces polarization, it is the color of his skin. Look at the political map.. Only one state, Maryland, below the Mason/Dixon Line is with Obama. This new Solid South will be the ruination of our Republican Party, as well a our Nation. Civility has already gone South (You lie) and the Almighty Dollar (In god we trust) has polluted the democratic process. Thank You supreme court & congress for the decline of the USA.
scamp
noun informal
he was a scamp in his younger days rascal, monkey, devil, imp, wretch, mischief-maker, troublemaker, prankster, rogue; informal scalawag, horror, monster, terror, holy terror, hellion, varmint, rapscallion; archaic scapegrace.
I
am
some
times a
little like a
lost soul this
happy season,
but I will persevere.
To
all.
Merry Christmas
and a
Happy New Year
Mack
The method of siphoning off the dividends to one owner is to acquire the company and thus the cash flow goes to the one owner instead of the former share holders. This cash is taken out of circulation, where formerly it was used as income by the thousands of now deprived middle class share holders. It is never returned to market; it goes to another takeover. It never sees main street again. Warren Buffet and Co. are top dogs with so much wealth that they don’t know what to do with it, But will keep on doing it until stopped